2009 Album Preview: Mastodon – Crack The Skye

What they’re saying
When we caught up with Brann Dailor in October, the drummer was keeping the secrets of Crack The Skye under wraps. Since then he’s, well, cracked, and told the whole story to Norwegian radio station, NRK P3:

There is a paraplegic and the only way that he can go anywhere is if he astral travels. He goes out of his body, into outer space and a bit like Icarus, he goes too close to the sun, burning off the golden umbilical cord that is attached to his solar plexus. So he is in outer space and he is lost, he gets sucked into a wormhole, he ends up in the spirit realm and he talks to spirits telling them that he is not really dead. So they send him to the Russian cult, they use him in a divination and they find out his problem. They decide they are going to help him. They put his soul inside Rasputin’s body. Rasputin goes to usurp the czar and he is murdered. The two souls fly out of Rasputin’s body through the crack in the sky(e) and Rasputin is the wise man that is trying to lead the child home to his body because his parents have discovered him by now and think that he is dead. Rasputin needs to get him back into his body before it’s too late. But they end up running into the Devil along the way and the Devil tries to steal their souls and bring them down…there are some obstacles along the way.

Suffice to say, any fears we may have had regarding Mastodon laying off the really weird shit now they’re running with the big boys, have been summarily dismissed.

Thrash Hits verdict
When our friends over at The Quietus had a listen to some rough mixes of the finished album, and controversially compared some of its elements to System Of A Down – a comparison bound to get a Mastodon fan’s blood boiling. The sample of the album’s opener, ‘Oblivion’, is currently playing over on Mastodon’s offficial website, and the leak of a live version of ‘Divinations’, suggest we can expect layer upon layer of chunky, brooding riffs, and hipster-metallers the world over reaffirming their hard-on for the Atlanta four-piece. As no doubt all the rest of us will do too.